WEEK : SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTION
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Last Saturday my girlfriend, Kate, and I set out to check
off a goal we set during a trip to San Francisco earlier this year; walk 26.2
miles in Chicago. While the experience of walking what we had dubbed “the World’s
Slowest Marathon” was outstanding, I’m equally thrilled with the results from
an experiment I did around a blog post related to our adventure.
We arrived home around 9pm after completing by then 26.33
miles and each of us posted a quick status update on Facebook of the
accomplishment and that a story and photos would follow on Sunday (attracting
11 likes and 5 comments). On Sunday, Kate wrote a more formal story of theadventure on her blog which included photos from both her phone and my camera
and posted a link on Facebook generating 18 likes and 5 comments.
Over the past few months I’ve been browsing Reddit.com on an
increasing frequency and thought that it might be just the platform to promote
the blog post about our marathon. On Sunday afternoon I made my first ever to
Reddit, under the /r/Chicago subreddit, with a link to her blog titled “Girlfriend
and I 'rolled our own' Chicago (walking) Marathon yesterday in 11 hours 56
minutes”. Through the rest of the night the blog stats continued to climb
before finally topping out at 710 visits for the story.
The following morning we received an email from a reporter
for DNAinfo who wanted to interview us for a story about the “World’s Slowest
Marathon”. While we didn’t ask how he found out about us, all indications point
back to the post made on Reddit. DNAinfo ended up doing a story on Monday which
resulted in another bump in traffic to her blog, resulting in the 2nd
highest visits/day she’s ever received (771 for the story and 1200 total). Additionally DNAinfo ended up linking
to the story on their Facebook page which became their most liked story ever
posted to Facebook with 619 likes, 106 shares and 30 comments. When we posted
the DNAinfo story on our own Facebook feed it generated an additional 48 likes
and 11 comments.
While all this was going on I also posted a link on my
Google+ account to see if it would achieve a similar bump as Reddit did and couldn’t
help but laugh a little when the stats showed it generated a total of 0
referrals for the day.
Some lessons learned during this online marketing test are
- Response, or lack of response, from a social medial channel doesn’t mean the promotion can’t find traction on other channels
- Posts from different sources on the same platform can have a dramatically different effect
- While reddit.com/r/Chicago was subreddit for this test, it’s possible we could have achieved greater visibility using a different subreddit
- The staying power of a story if fairly limited, unless new outlets continue to pick it up.
